The Democratic Party National Convention (DNC) in Chicago ended on August 22, after nominating its first Black/South Asian woman for President of the United States.
Kamala Devi Harris is the daughter of an immigrant mother from India and immigrant father from Jamaica. Not since 2008, when Barack Obama, the first Black man was nominated and elected as president, has it been considered possible again.
There was genuine excitement at the DNC, even if the event was orchestrated like a Hollywood movie. Dissent was not allowed on the floor. When it did, ushers quickly shut it down.
The mainstream media saw what they wanted to see: excitement and a united voice for change.
Meanwhile, thousands of anti-war and pro-Palestine protesters rallied in the streets outside the convention hall.
Inside the convention, about 30 delegates who had been elected in the primaries by party voters as “uncommitted” — for their opposition to President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war — were seated. They voted “present” during the official roll call vote for Harris, rather than endorse her directly.
When Biden stepped aside as the presidential nominee, he turned over his delegates to Harris. The party apparatus arranged for her smooth selection.
The convention confirmed Tim Walz as Harris’ Vice Presidential running mate. Walz is a mid-western liberal who sent in the National Guard during the George Floyd anti-police protests in 2020. President Donald Trump praised him for doing so, at the time.
Who is Kamala Harris?
Harris’ mother migrated to California from India with a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley in 1958. It was a time when Federal immigration law made it almost impossible for Asians to legally come to the US. The racist quota system, which favoured migrants from European countries, was not changed until 1965.
Harris’ father migrated from Jamaica and attended the same university. They married at a time when most states made inter-racial marriages a crime.
Harris’ mother, after an early divorce, raised her with the help of a family friend while she worked long hours as a scientist. Her story contrasts with Republican presidential nominee, Trump, who grew up as a privileged son of a real estate mogul in New York City.
Harris has made women’s equality and reproductive rights central to winning. She knows most women support them, including many Republican women. As a Black and South Asian she hopes to appeal to Black people and other people of colour and migrants.
The Republicans have already begun to use racism and the fact she is a woman to attack her. Trump openly appeals to whites’ racist fears they are being replaced by Black people, other people of colour, and Black and brown immigrants. His misogyny is well known. His far-right Vice Presidential running mate JD Vance takes up the slack.
Who will be the best commander in chief to defend US imperialism? The rulers are divided. But none believe Harris is a leftist threat.
In her acceptance speech at the DNC, Harris promised to sign Biden’s inhumane, militarised bipartisan Border Bill and is ready to prosecute US wars abroad, and to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”.
To drive this point home, Harris restated her unflinching support for the state of Israel and its criminal war on Palestine. While acknowledging some suffering of civilians in Gaza she emphasised — like Biden — that she stands on the side of Israel’s claim of “self-defence”.
When the Harris-Walz campaign refused to allow a Palestinian person to speak on the main stage at the DNC, after having invited the family of US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin to address the convention, a Muslim women’s group campaigning for Harris announced it was disbanding in protest.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein told her supporters that the Democrats’ actions in Chicago should come as no surprise, given the party’s platform, which promises Israel:
• “Ongoing, unconditional military aid and an official reassertion of ‘Israel's right to defend itself’ (a right they don't extend to Palestinians).
• “Vague support for ceasefire conditions that are entirely at Israel's discretion, allowing them to continue the slaughter in Gaza (and the West Bank) until THEY decide they've killed enough.
• “Continued diplomatic cover for Israel’s apartheid regime with a pledge to “oppose any effort” to criticize or 'delegitimize Israel’, including UN sanctions and the BDS movement.
“The Democrats don’t stop with giving Israel everything they could dream of,” wrote Stein. “The platform also recklessly stokes the flames of a broader regional war by legitimizing Israel’s attacks against Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen — one that could easily set off a third world war.”
‘This isn’t a platform. It’s a time bomb’
Every day there were large pro-Palestine protests outside the convention. The main demands were for recognition of Palestinians as human beings with rights, a call for an immediate arms embargo for Israel and a permanent cease fire.
It is easy to be confused by the hype around the Harris campaign. That obscures the fact that the two ruling parties (it is impossible for third parties to get press and equal time) reflect the interests of the capitalist class.
Superficially, it seems they are different parties with different interests. That's a mistake. They only have tactical differences on how to rule.
Trump mainly appeals to white men and women as his base and he overwhelmingly won the white male vote in his previous runs for president. Harris speaks up for the inclusion of minorities and women in bourgeois institutions.
Trump is critical of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and wars abroad, but supports tariffs and sanctions against declared US enemies. Expansion of NATO, a military alliance aimed against Russia, continued under Trump, despite his criticisms. Harris also supports the expansion of NATO and in her convention speech she gave a war-mongering defence of US foreign policy, threatening Russia, Iran and China.
Working class party
Neither party represents the interests of the working class and oppressed at home or abroad. Harris’ nomination, as historic as it is, means little to the working masses, including the poor and oppressed.
Democracy Now! co-host Juan González led the New York City Puerto Rican radical group the Young Lords and was a member of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. He took part in the 1968 DNC in Chicago and the anti-Vietnam war protests outside it that were brutally attacked by police. González said after this year’s DNC that “we saw the two faces of capitalism this summer at the Republican and Democratic Party conventions”.
The most serious political voice is coming from the Green Party’s presidential candidate, Stein.
Who one votes for of the two parties, if one votes at all, is almost meaningless. Nearly half the population doesn’t even bother to vote. The key to winning fundamental change is what you do the other days in the year.
The only reason the issue of Palestine was visible at all at the DNC is because of the mass pro-cease fire, pro-Palestine movement. The protests were seen on social media, even if scarcely reported by the mainstream media.
That the protests took place was a victory for the broad ethnic and racial movement that began 10 months ago. The fact that the mayor of Chicago allowed the protests to take place outside the convention, despite the Democratic National Committee and police seeking to have them kilometres away, was also a victory. Mayor Brandon Johnson, elected in 2023 and a former teacher, is himself a veteran of street protests in the Black community.
To win and defeat the US backed Israeli aggressors will require an even bigger mass movement in the US and abroad. It can happen.